Razer takes a stand: F**K SOPA!!!

Very recently Razer has made an announcement and its really nice to see some from the PC H/W business making their stand clear: They are against SOPA.

This is what they had to say in their facebook page:

Now that we’ve got your attention, we want to draw your attention to a threat that threatens the very core of the gaming community.The “Stop Online Piracy Act”, aka SOPA, is a proposed bill in the United States Congress that, if enacted, would effectively end the internet as we know it.

In a ham-fisted attempt to combat piracy, Congress has opted for the “Nuke from Orbit” approach, hurting both the community from whom they benefit and developers they seek to protect. We cannot allow this to happen.If this is the first you are hearing of SOPA, take a moment to read the bill itself by visiting the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more information.

Allow us to stress, Razer does not condone piracy in any way. We feel it damages the industry and we will stand against anything that hurts either the gaming community or the developers. However, we firmly believe that SOPA is the absolute wrong way to combat this problem and we are not alone in thinking this. Other gaming companies like Red 5, Riot Games and Mojang stand with us in opposition. However, this bill does not only affect software and game developers and we hope our actions will lead other gaming hardware vendors to join our protest against SOPA.

So please join us in a day of protest. We will be taking down our site for one day, January 18th, to give you taste of what the future may hold if we fail to put an end to SOPA and similar ill-conceived legislation.

In its place, we will upload the image above as a placeholder for our site. While this may have an impact on our business, we believe this is a small price to pay to show how the Internet could become if this bill was to be supported.For Gamers. By Gamers. It is not just a motto, it is our way of life. We work hard to do right by our community.

We’ll be damned if we’re going to let an attack like this go unanswered.

-Team Razer

*We apologize in advance to anyone offended by the image but it sums up our perspective to this draconian bill.

Speaking of censorship:

Its a good thing that a lot of people are standing against SOPA. Truth be told if this bill gets passed, then I am sure lobbyists from other democratic and free countries will use this to put a nail over the politics and gain their confidence to do the same, especially in India. We all know about Kapil Sibal and Congress Party trying to make worse why dry humping (excuse my language, but you know what I mean) against facebook and Google.

While I admit that some content is questionable and hurtful in social networking and blogs, you cannot throw a law book at them and force them to express their opinion. In reality, a majority of the population is simply too busy to keep a track on such offensive materials and even if they do they usually report it.

By max, the government could have simply said to "reinforce the terms and conditions" but using legal power to discourage people doesn’t sit well either. Now that government is behaving this way, you have to wonder if they will plan to do the same thing against those who express their opinion in the comment section as well?

Despite their grand plan of blocking the file sharing sites to "protect their merchandise against piracy", Medianama linked to a tweet stating that Singham’s torrent is doing well in Pirate Bay. However, unlike in United States not many are speaking about this in India and now all thanks to Sonia Gandhi & Co. stifling the freedom of speech is bad. Mainstream media might not say about it.

A week ago, Zee News have put up a newscast in their TV channel about consumers complaining that consumers have been complaining about making excuses to prevent people from porting their number to another service of their choice, but they have stopped that reporting halfway across and replaced it with Air India’s issue news cast. Unless a rival mainstream media who clearly isn’t under the respected company’s paycheque (advertisement revenues and sponsored events/shows, ofcourse) and a honest/credible journalist having the guts to do the needful.

As said by one of the readers in another leading and well known tech site "Censorship is not a global phenomenon, rather its a tool used by politicians to establish their authority and get a "mighty than thou" attitude". Except now, the corporates are doing the same thing.

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